THE INTERVIEW: Eric Machiels, the Belgian who’s making millions from our rubbish

He's a Belgian who understands better than most that old Yorkshire saying ‘wherethere’s muck there’s brass’ and who has built a billion-pound business on Britain’srubbish dumps.

Eric Machiels has transformed Infinis from a landfill company into one of our ‘greenest’ and most profitable energy firms.

Eight years ago Infinis made annual profits of about £12 million. In two months’ time it is expected to announce that they are closer to £100 million for 2010.

Lifestyle choice: Eric Machiels says that he hasn’t become a tree hugger just yet

Its financial transformation could not have come at a better time for
its owner, buyout king Guy Hands and his Terra Firma private equity
empire.

EMI was finally seized by its bank Citigroup last week and Terra Firma is believed to have lost £1.6 billion.

But the careful management of Inifinis by Machiels, 44, may go some
way to making up Terra Firma’s losses if the group can really raise £1
billion from a sale.

Under Machiels’ leadership – he is chief executive and chairman –
Northampton-based Infinis has become one of our largest generators of
renewable power, an achievement that was recognised when it won the HSBC
Growth Strategy of the Year Award at the prestigious European Business
Awards last October.

The basis of the company’s astonishing growth is methane, the
greenhouse gas lurking in former landfill sites that have been grassed
over.

Nearly ten per cent of Britain’s renewable energy now comes from
electricity generated by methane from Infinis’s 124 landfill sites. To
put it simply, holes are drilled into the dump and the gas extracted is
piped to turbines, which create the electricity, which is sold to the
National Grid.

Not a difficult concept, but it took Machiels and Terra Firma to
realise that the Government, desperate to achieve tough greenhouse
targets, would be willing to pay big subsidies.

‘When we took over Waste Recycling Group’s landfill sites in 2006, we
soon realised that the gas was being wasted, rather than being used,’
he says. ‘We saw that a lot of value was literally being burned. That is
why we decided to set up a separate company, Infinis.’

Massive investment has been made to maximise the potential. New computers
systems, automated equipment and high-powered turbines have led to a surge in the amount of gas extracted.

The landfill business is not a long-term prospect. The Government is
doing its best to limit the number of sites, but at the moment the UK is
still sending about 15 million tons of waste to landfills every year
and the level of biodegradable material in them is expected to be high
for some time to come.

Machiels is quick to point out that landfill sites are predicted to release gas for the next
50 years, but also that the group has diversified with its takeover of renewable energy
group Novera just over a year ago.

‘The acquisition of Novera with its hydroelectric and wind turbine
operations is part of our strategy of widening our interests in the
renewable business,’ he says. Machiels is also thinking about putting
solar panels around landfill sites and harnessing the skills of his 300
engineers to move into anaerobic digestion, where plant and animal
material is digested by micro-organisms, releasing more lucrative methane.

Machiels lives in upmarket Richmond, south-west London, with his
wife, Alexandra, who is a fund manager, and their five young children.

But while highly successful as a green entrepreneur, he declines to
go into detail on his choice of car, insulation or heating. ‘I am not a
tree hugger yet,’ he says with a smile.